Relay

This clever, high-concept thriller stars Oscar winner Riz Ahmed as a rigorously reclusive middleman for would-be whistleblowers seeking to settle with corporate malefactors. Deftly helmed by David Mackenzie (Outlaw King, TIFF ’18), Relay is a cat-and-mouse game for an age of hyper-surveillance when it’s never been harder to leave no trace.

Ash (Ahmed) brokers deals between parties who never learn what he looks like, sounds like, or where he’s located. A brilliant manipulator of technologies old and new, Ash’s primary method of communication is a telephone relay service where operators are legally bound to withhold the identities of their users. Ash’s latest client is Sarah Grant (Lily James, TIFF ’17’s Darkest Hour), a former bio-tech company staffer who’s been on the run since stealing documents that, if made public, would be scandalous for her employer. Sarah now wants to return the documents in exchange for whatever remuneration she can get.

The case should be business as usual for Ash, but the henchmen hired to follow Sarah are ruthless and dogged. What’s more, Ash begins to connect with Sarah on a personal level, potentially compromising the private existence he’s worked so arduously to construct.

Written by Justin Piasecki, Relay is riddled with ingenious feats of misdirection, novel set pieces, and jaw-dropping twists that would have made Hitchcock proud. At its heart is a hero who has made a vocation of living in the shadows, but is faced with a situation in which he may have no other choice but to step into the light.

JANE SCHOETTLE

Content advisory: violence, coarse language